San Diego nonstop to Frankfurt and beyond starts this week

Ingrid Friedl / Lufthansa

Lufthansa's Airbus A 340-300 will be used to ferry passengers between San Diego and Frankfurt. The new nonstop service is starting this week in time for the start of the summer season. Foto: Ingrid Friedl Lufthansa: 07.2008 0807_A343_01

Lufthansa's Airbus A 340-300 will be used to ferry passengers between San Diego and Frankfurt. The new nonstop service is starting this week in time for the start of the summer season. Foto: Ingrid Friedl Lufthansa: 07.2008 0807_A343_01 (Ingrid Friedl / Lufthansa)

Starting Thursday, Lufthansa is launching nonstop service between San Diego and Frankfurt, Germany, marking the airport’s fourth overseas nonstop route to an international destination.

The five-day-a-week flights were announced last year, with the start of service to coincide with the beginning of Lufthansa’s extended summer season.

The San Diego International Airport and Lufthansa are marking the occasion Thursday with an “aircraft salute” for the incoming flight and a ribbon-cutting for the late-afternoon departure of the outbound flight.

Condor, a smaller German airline, had begun offering nonstop service between San Diego and Frankfurt for up to three days a week last summer but then announced it would discontinue the flights by the end of last September. The announcement came not long after Lufthansa said it would begin service of its own this year.

Lufthansa's decision to add San Diego to its portfolio of nonstop routes was made after considerable monitoring of demand for leisure and business travel on its partner airlines, United and Air Canada.

“As we see that demand developing over the years on both the leisure and corporate side via our joint partners, it then goes on the table for a nonstop to that destination,” explained Larry Ryan, Lufthansa Group’s senior director of sales for the U.S. “What we were carrying from San Diego via the U.S. hubs reached a certain level to where there was adequate demand to bring in a nonstop.

“With all due respect to Condor, the end of the line for them is Frankfurt. The vast majority of our traffic between us and hubs in Europe goes beyond Germany.”

He noted that the airline is currently seeing strong demand into multiple cities in Italy and also in France and Spain, with some of those flights just an hour in duration from Frankfurt.

In all, the new flight will connect to more than 150 destinations in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent.

Flights from San Diego to Frankfurt will depart at 3:05 pm. every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, arriving the next day in Germany at 11:20 a.m. Return flights will touch down in San Diego at 1:20 p.m.

Ryan said he expects the frequency of the flights to remain at five times a week but if demand is higher, that could change at the end of the first year. The lowest roundtrip fares on the 279-seat Airbus A340-300 planes for travel through May 1 start at $1,627, the airline said. Fares are lower — $1,177 — for the period between Oct. 28 and Dec. 14.

As part of the agreement to induce Lufthansa to introduce the Frankfurt nonstop, the San Diego airport agreed to spend $750,000 over two years on marketing the new flight, plus waive landing fees of roughly $500,000 the first year and $250,000 the second. Rebates for terminal space rental are also being offered, said Hampton Brown, director of air service planning.

Much of those costs are made up by the added revenues from passengers purchasing concessions at the airport, Brown said. More importantly, the increased tourism trade delivered by the flights will mean more spending at local hotels, which translates into additional room tax revenue to San Diego.

“But the Philippines always pops up as a possible Asia flight and Korea too,” Brown said. “We’re making progress. We’re within a year to a two-year time frame of having something.”

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